Welcome to this special guest-edited issue, featuring poetry recommendations by Marisca Pichette!
Marisca is one of my favorite writers. Her poetry and prose always feature breathtaking language, with characters I love and stories I can’t forget.
From her bio:
Her writing has been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Pushcart, Best of the Net, Rhysling, Utopia, and Dwarf Stars awards. Straying from fairy tale to horror to the in-between, her work investigates queerness and marginalized identity–often involving monsters.
I was thrilled when Marisca agreed to curate a poetry issue for MicroVerse! I bet you’re gonna love this!
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By Jayasri Sridhar in Heartlines Spec * 18 lines
Today, the town grows around our home,
Tends to our garden of herbs, seeks our counsel
On matters of trade and conflict and survival.
I start with this poem as it feels so pertinent to now. Sridhar accomplishes in just a few lines what I long for in all speculative poetry. It bites, it soothes, and it promises a wider world of which we’ve been offered merely a glimpse.
By Jennifer Crow in Kaleidotrope * 43 lines
They ignored
warnings from shrieking gulls
and paid no heed to ghost ships
crowding a storm-dark horizon
Crow’s poem delights me in a dark way, calling to mind a story that stuck with me from childhood: “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. This is a celebration you don’t wish to join, but yearn to witness nonetheless—at a safe remove, of course.
in which Orpheus is a Hmong daughter
By Phoua Lee in Psychopomp * 130 lines
two possibilities:
the shoes rip
or she rips,
both torn by desirous ghosts.
I can’t resist an Underworld journey, especially one with such livid detail and heartbreak as Lee’s. This poem beckons deliciously, dangerously, and if you’re not careful, you may not make it back from its inky well.
By P.H. Low in Haven Spec * 16 lines
yes, my cuffed hands clench;
there’s a clockwise twist in my depths.
so what? I played for you, once
I love a short, incisive poem. Low’s piece is one best read twice, thrice, and savored again with each and every taste.
By Mari Ness in Small Wonders * 46 lines
One son is not enough. Not when
she knows how long it can take
to speak ten thousand names, or more,
knows she may not have the same fortune
if she stumbles into another tale.
I am, of course, a sucker for a fairytale retelling, and Ness doesn’t disappoint with this one. Love and grief and fear twine under the yoke of an inescapable ending.
By Amelia Gorman in Eye to the Telescope * 28 lines
When I walked in on him reading again
in the library even I resented it a little,
how many times memory would be rubbed
raw on my skin, how the house was never mine.
An exquisite piece blending an old story with evergreen oppression. Blood of my blood…or dust to dust.
By Eleanor Ball in Haven Spec * 18 lines
Then I grasp my grandma,
pull her through the fog. Speaking her tongue,
a tongue that has yet to be.
This seemed to me a fitting poem to end on. Soft around the edges and hard of heart. But it’s not the hardness of cold, no. Here is the strength of endurance and the unhealed cut of memory that outlives life.
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Marisca Pichette is a queer author based of more than three hundred pieces of speculative short fiction and poetry, appearing in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Deadlands, Fantasy Magazine, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Nightmare Magazine, and many others. Her speculative poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker and Elgin Awards. Their eco-horror novella, Every Dark Cloud, is out now from Ghost Orchid Press.
Find Marisca on Instagram at @marisca_write or Bluesky at @marisca.bsky.social
Order Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair
Order Every Dark Cloud
Myna Chang 